Normally I am not quite a fan of Phillip Starck’s designs, but in the most recent issue of DAMn magazine his ideas really grabbed me. Here is an excerpt for your reading pleasure:

“The intelligent part of human production always focuses on reducing materiality. the main lines tend towards dematerialisation, which in itself implies lightness and invisibility. The future is not the production of matter. Intelligence lies in the creation of ideas and actions. Think of computers. Initially they had very low capacities and were the size of an apartment building. But gradually they became so powerful that now they are the size of an envelope. And their capacity will continue to grow exponentially until a time in the near future when they will have completely disappeared and become virtual, like the iCloud…the less material an object is, the more intelligent it becomes.”

And on the topic of luxury:

“I’m not interested in the concept of luxury…if I were to talk about luxury, I would say that it is an entity that continuously shifts such that part of the population never has access to it. I think that’s the idea, because once you can afford luxury, it is no longer a luxury. Like caviar and smoked salmon. As soon as you could buy them in the supermarket, they were no longer a luxury. So you can see that it is all a mirage, a bit like smoke and mirrors. Something that is always shifting on the horizon and is never within reach…I would be inclined to say that there is a negative connotation. I would prefer to substitute intelligence and quality for the word luxury. And these two notions should absolutely be accessible. It is not a choice. It’s a duty to make these available to the greatest number of people. The only modern elegance is the multiplication of good ideas and quality.”

“Money and culture have never been easily disentangled, nor would one want them to be, considering that culture is by no means cost efficient. But there are different forms of patronage and different kinds of entanglements. And culture is now in retreat before the brute force of money. Even the most easygoing commentators can see the writing on the wall, and some critics who might have been expected to be amused by the Cattelan retrospective have not enjoyed the show. Who knows? Maybe they’re tired of partying in a funhouse where they will never be more than dinner guests. As for the people who buy and sell Maurizio Cattelan, my guess is they don’t give a damn what critics—or for that matter museumgoers—say.”

justin-wolf: “This paper examines the conditions of contemporary artistic production, specifically for the artists working within the capitalistic economic system whether their engagement is direct or indirect. One of the conditions that will be discussed at length is the role of the market and public in today’s artistic production. As Boris Groys puts it in his essay Introduction: Poetics vs. Aesthetics if, in the past, the religious and political authorities determined the content of work through the patronage system, today, artists, have gained a sense of autonomy from these authorities, but are as much as obliged to address the interests of the public.[1] Artists no longerhave to depict the scenes from the Bible anymore, but much artistic production today takes place with the understanding (and the projection) of its own marketability in the art market and desirability from the public as preliminary conditions. This is especially true for career artists, whose artistic production equals their livelihood and preferred source of income (as opposed to taking a ‘day job’). For them, the question of how to acquire marketability and desirability of their artistic products becomes a serious existential consideration. However, even if capitalism is not the artists’ immediate economic system, since capitalism is the de facto economic system of the global economy—and necessarily, the global art market—even artistic production in non-capitalistic systems eventually becomes measured in capitalistic principles. This forces us to reevaluate why we make things that we make, when the success of artistic products does not exclusively stem from the work within, but becomes quantifiable in terms of its market success and institutional acceptance. In such cases, the artistic products lose its ability to assert values of its own to itself but rather become a recipient of it. In other words, conditions of contemporary artistic production encourage subordination of the artist’s autonomy to his or her audience. Though it seems like artists are free to make whatever they wish, the scope of the their freedom is not themselves but, rather, the aesthetic sensibility of the viewers who assigns value to the artistic products.”

“As politicized work, aesthetic interventions and politicized gestures are shadow-theater battles that fail to address the new realities of capitalism. Furthermore, contemporary art thrives on what Mark Fisher calls the aesthetics of demise, taking up the ethico-political task of showing the horrors of capitalism in the most realistic manner, turning spectators into stupefied, passive contemplators.”

http://www.artandeducation.net/paper/art-under-the-new-world-order/